‘Marc Brown’s Playtime Rhymes,’ and More

November 8, 2013

Children’s Books

By LEONARD S. MARCUS

As expectant parents in the mid-1940s, a donnish English couple named Iona and Peter Opie became curious about the origins and back stories of the Mother Goose rhymes they recalled from childhood and would soon be reciting to their own newborn. When their “Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes” finally appeared in 1951, it caused a stir, not only by validating childhood lore as a serious field of study but also by making the case for the rhymes as literature that generations had remembered less for their nonsense than for their nutshell artistry and usefulness in everyday life.

Grandpa's lullaby: From "The Silver Moon."

Alphabet rhymes, counting rhymes, frankly cautionary ditties like “Jack and Jill” — the pragmatic agenda of the Mother Goose canon ranges widely. “Marc Brown’s Playtime Rhymes” showcases yet another possibility: the traditional rhymes that come with a component of physical play that affords young children the chance to wiggle and unwind as they act out amusing, easy-to-master mini-dramas like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “I’m a Little Teapot,” or the one whose rhyme starts: “This little pig went to market.” Long before psychologists roamed the earth tracking preschoolers’ fine-­motor development, these charming games gave youngsters opportunities to hone and display their nimbleness and dexterity, to engage in a tender form of cooperative play and to stretch their imaginations. Here is interactivity pure and simple, with no batteries required, and learning the games from this well-designed book is itself surprisingly easy.

To the left of each text line, a small schematic drawing clearly indicates the corresponding finger, hand, arm, or body movement or position. The larger color illustrations, painted on textured wooden panels in sugary pastel colors, expand on the playful narratives embedded in the rhymes in scenes set in the present day. Much of Brown’s art is relentlessly cheery, with even the teapot “short and stout” assigned a slap-happy grin. But when the artist gets a tad more real about his characters, as he does for “The Wheels on the Bus” with its witty rogues’ gallery of oddball passengers, the scene comes alive: every face is worth a gander.

Fleeing flatware: From "My Mother Goose."

Jack Prelutsky — veteran rhymester, troubadour and the Poetry Foundation’s first children’s poet laureate (2006-8) — has written 20 brief “lullabies and cradle songs” in the manner of another subset of the old-chestnut rhymes, those whose purpose is to lull young children to sleep. Nearly all of Prelutsky’s poems are cast in the voice of a doting parent or other caregiver and addressed to a child, including two poems (modern update!) spoken by a father, and two by grandparents. Lilting rhythms and touching professions of love abound. But a poem must ultimately work its magic one word at a time, and in several of these lyrics, the author has, it seems, simply reached for the nearest word at hand. A cricket “chirps,” stars “twinkle,” the silver moon “shines softly,” and a night wind “softly sighs.” Generic, your-name-here language like this may sound poetic, but it does little to unlock, or illuminate, the feelings of affection and intimacy that these poems aim to bolster and affirm.

In the best poems of this uneven collection, Prelutsky shows us how the magic is done. “Bird Lullaby” is a jaunty mantra composed almost entirely from the names of birds: “Robin, jay, sparrow, chat, chickadee, wren, / Mockingbird, meadowlark, hummingbird, hen, / Oriole, bunting, crow, tanager, thrush, / Bobolink, swallow, are all in a hush.” The second stanza is just as much fun to recite, or memorize. And in the luminous title poem, a lone beetle rowing an “acorn boat / Across a silver lake” offers a striking metaphor both for childhood vulnerability and the counterbalancing urge children feel to explore and test limits. Jui Ishida, a versatile artist with a keen sense of design, illustrates the poem with an elaborately choreographed nocturnal seascape in which the doughty bug paddles through reassuringly calm waters as a glowing firefly, a friendly fish and the moon all watch over, and out for, the wee wayfarer.

Go tell it on the treetops: From "Marc Brown's Playtime Rhymes."

Perhaps it is the old pre-Opie suspicion that tried-and-true nursery rhymes like “Jack Be Nimble” and “Humpty Dumpty” are “just nonsense” that prompted the publisher of David McPhail’s satisfying grab bag of more than five dozen such verses to name the volume: “My Mother Goose: A Collection of Favorite Rhymes, Songs, and Concepts.” This last item — which refers to a handful of pictorial spreads on such themes as “Action Words” and “Getting Dressed” — seems calculated to reassure wary book buyers that a modest investment in Mother Goose might indeed yield some tangible result. No need to worry. It would be hard to find a pithier, or more palatable, admonishment to look before leaping, for example, than the rhyme that goes: “Three wise men of Gotham, / They went to sea in a bowl, / And if the bowl had been stronger / My song would be longer.” Here too are mini-sketches of tricksters, fools, brave-hearts and other universal human types; lullabies and counting rhymes; and verses like “Hey Diddle Diddle” whose use lies in the brio and ease with which they prove that language is among the niftiest of all our toys.

The child characters in McPhail’s sprightly, lyrical watercolors are wistful daydreamers who bear a certain family resemblance to those first seen in children’s book art in the path-finding early illustration work of Maurice Sendak for such picture books as Ruth Krauss’s “A Hole Is to Dig”; Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear series; and “The Moon Jumpers,” by Janice May Udry. McPhail’s youngsters are more apt to be rosy cheeked than Sendak’s, and also to look a bit more laid back, as though freed from the arty obligation to double as an archetype. His animals in human dress look like people we might wish to know, or perhaps even to be. Mother Goose rhymes are like that too, surprising us with their fun-house view of the world and everyone in it, not least of all ourselves.